The local telco, BC Tel., has made a decision not to accept any more orders from Internet Service Providers, and in fact from any BBS or other modem user, for Centrex lines. In fact, they are actively seeking to have some new tarrif item added to cover this high circuit use activity.
It turns out that the Centrex lines - a straw grasped by the ISPs in the wake of the change in tarrif covering Business Measured Overline service in mid 1994 - are simply not geared to handling 80-90% busy as most of the ISP lines tend to be. The kicker came late in 1994 when local BBS Mindlink! turned up over 100 lines in New Westminster, a suburb of Vancouver, and the local banks couldn't get dialtone. The telco boys neglected to put in more trunking between the main Centrex switch and the slave when they added the the new lines; lines that when all busy would eat up the whole set of trunks, as they did. The upshot was that poor Mindlink! got a whole 4 hours to notify customers that they were changing phone numbers.
In similar vein, Wimsey itself was given a little more warning, 4 days, when its trunks were switched out of the Centrex switch. In this case we were given the boon of having the old numbers call forwarded to the new ones, but the change still caused lots of problems.
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